Hundreds carried nets of sweet
potatoes, eggs, and kalo, artistically arranged. Men staggered
along in couples with bamboos between them, supporting clusters of
bananas weighing nearly a hundredweight. Others brought yams,
cocoa-nuts, oranges, onions, pumpkins, early pineapples, and even
the great delicious granadilla, the fruit of the large passion-
flower. A few maidens presented the king with bouquets of choice
flowers, and costly leis of the yellow feathers of the Melithreptes
Pacifica. There were fully two tons of kalo and sweet potatoes in
front of the court house, hundreds of fowls, and piles of bananas,
eggs, and cocoa-nuts. The hookupu was a beautiful sight, all the
more so that not one of that radiant, loving, gift-offering throng
came in quest of office, or for any other thing that he could
obtain. It was just the old-time spirit of reverence for the man
who typifies rule, blended with the extreme of personal devotion to
the prince whom a united people had placed upon the throne. The
feeling was genuine and pathetic in its intensity. It is said that
the natives like their king better, because he was truly, "above
all," the last of a proud and imperious house, which, in virtue of a
pedigree of centuries, looked down upon the nobility of the
Kamehamehas.
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